When CEOs need to fire themselves

One of the hardest things for first-time founder/CEOs to figure out is what role to play as the company starts to grow.

All CEOs, founding or not, have a centre of gravity. It can be sales,
product, engineering, marketing, finance, etc. It’s the place they feel
most comfortable, most grounded. It’s where they grew up in their
career, or if they haven’t had much of one, it’s the place where they
feel they have insight or instinct.

At the start of a company’s life, founder CEOs are often also doing
the jobs of other “skill” positions (being the head of product, for
example). But, inertia is a very powerful force. It’s very easy to just
keep doing what you were doing. If you were a coder in the early part of
your company’s life, it’s easy to just keep coding. If you were a
product person in the beginning, it’s easy to stay deeply involved in
product.

The error I see, far too often, is the founding CEOs do these skill
positions way too long and don’t recognise the cost to the organisation.

For example, let’s say a founding CEO is a really good product
person. As the company adds its first few engineers, the CEO keeps
playing the product role (in addition to, usually, the BD role, the
sales role, and the marketing role). As the business grows more, the CEO
realises they need to add more bench strength by bringing in some
senior specialists — let’s say a head of BD. Then the same happens for
marketing. Then sales.

But the last thing to go is usually the CEO's “comfort zone” skill
(what they grew up in their career doing and, in this example, product).